The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

by Honoré de Balzac

  My angel, henceforth send your letters to Madame Gaston, care of general delivery, Versailles. We will go and collect our mail every day. I do not want us to be known in the area. We will send the servants to Paris for provisions. I hope in this way to live our lives shrouded in mystery. Over the past year, as my retreat was being constructed, no one has ever been seen there, and the purchase was made in the midst of the upheavals that followed the July revolution. The only person who has shown himself in the area is my architect: people here know only him, and soon he will come back no more. Farewell. As I write that word, I feel as much sorrow as pleasure in my heart; does it not mean I will soon miss you as powerfully as I love Gaston?

  49

  FROM MARIE GASTON TO DANIEL D’ARTHEZ

  October 1833

  My dear Daniel, I require two witnesses for my wedding; be so kind as to come to my rooms tomorrow evening, and bring our great and glorious friend Joseph Bridau with you. It is my future wife’s intention to live far from the world of men, utterly forgotten. She has anticipated my fondest wish. I have told you nothing of my love, you who lightened the hardships of my poverty; now you will understand why this absolute secrecy was essential, and why we have seen so little of each other in the past year. The day after our wedding, you and I will be parted for some considerable time. Daniel, your soul will not fail to understand me: The friendship will go on, even without the friend. I may sometimes need you, but I will never see you, at least not in my house. Here too she has made our fondest wishes come true. For my sake she has sacrificed her friendship with a schoolmate, a veritable sister to her; I was obliged to give up my friend as well. What I have just told you will give you an idea not of a passion but of a profound love, unmingled, complete, and divine, founded on the intimate mutual understanding of the two people thus binding themselves. My happiness is pure and limitless, but, as some secret law forbids us unalloyed felicity, I conceal, deep in my soul, buried in the furthest recess, a thought that gnaws at me alone, of which she knows nothing. You too often came to my aid in my perpetual penury not to know my desperate financial condition. Where did I find the courage to go on, when my hopes were so often dashed? In your past, my friend, by your side, where I found so many consolations and such thoughtful support. My dear friend, she has chosen to pay off all my debts. She is rich, and I have nothing. How many times have I said, in my fits of laziness, “Ah! if only some rich woman would take me on!” Well, now that it has come to pass, the young man’s facetious joke, the amoral pauper’s compromise, all of that faded away. I am humiliated, for all her ingenious cajoleries. I am humiliated, however wholly convinced I am of the nobility of her soul. I am humiliated, even as I know that my humiliation is proof of my love. She saw that I did not recoil from that ignominy. In that one way, I am not the protector but the protected. I tell you of this regret in strictest confidence.

  Apart from that, my dear Daniel, my dreams have been realized down to the tiniest detail. I have found beauty without tarnish, goodness without flaw. The bride is, as they say, too good to be true; there is a mind behind her tenderness, she has the sort of charm and grace that brings constant variety to love; she is educated, understands everything; she is pretty, blond, slender, slightly fleshy: as if Raphael and Rubens had come together to create a woman! I do not believe I could ever love a brunette so much as a blond: I have always thought brunettes somewhat mannish. She is a widow, she has never had children, she is twenty-seven years old. Although she is lively, bright, and tireless, she can nonetheless take pleasure in melancholic reflections. These wondrous gifts imply no lack of dignity or nobility: she is a most regal woman. She belongs to one of France’s most nobility-riddled old families, but she loves me enough to overlook the unfortunate circumstances of my birth. We have long loved in secret, testing each other; we are both equally jealous, our thoughts are indeed the two flashes of a single thunderbolt. We are both in love for the first time, and we found in the springtime just past a delicious setting for all the longed-for moments the imagination decorates with its happiest, sweetest, deepest inspirations. Loving emotion heaped its flowers on us. Every day that went by was a full day, and when we parted, we wrote poems to each other. I never thought of allowing desire to tarnish that sunlit season, although it bedeviled my soul without end. She was a widow, she was free, she fully understood the reverence implied by that restraint; often it moved her to tears. In all I have told you of her, my dear Daniel, you will have seen a truly superior creature. We have yet even to exchange a first kiss: each of us feared the other.

  “We both have something to regret in our past,” she told me.

  “I don’t see yours.”

  “My marriage,” she answered.

  You who are a great man, you who love one of the most extraordinary women of the same aristocracy in which I found my Armande, that sentence alone will give you a sense of her soul, and of the future happiness of

  your friend,

  Marie Gaston

  50

  FROM MADAME DE L’ESTORADE TO MADAME DE MACUMER

  Can it be, Louise, that after all the private sorrows you brought down on yourself by making of marriage a mutual passion you now want to live with a husband in solitude? You killed one in the midst of society, and now you want to hide yourself away to devour another? What torments you are preparing for yourself! But, by the way you have gone about it, I can see there is nothing now to be done. Any man who can make you overcome your aversion for second marriages must have an angelic soul, a divine heart; you must be allowed to cling to your illusions, but have you forgotten what you once said of young men, who have traveled all manner of vile backwaters, their innocence lost at the most sordid crossroads? Who changed, you or they? You are very lucky to believe in happiness; I have no force to fault you for it, although the instincts of my affection compel me to talk you out of that marriage. Yes, a hundred times yes, nature and society work together to destroy any perfect felicity, because perfect felicities go against nature and society, perhaps because heaven allows no interlopers in its realm. In any case, my friendship foresees some sorrow awaiting you, of what sort I cannot say; I know not where it will come from, nor who will cause it, but, my dear, without question, an immense, boundless happiness will destroy you in the end. Excessive joy is an even heavier burden than the most massive grief. I say nothing against him: you love him, and of course I have never seen him, but you will, I hope, some day when you find yourself unoccupied, write me a portrait of that strange, beautiful animal.

  If you see me blithely accepting all this, it is because I have no doubt that once the honeymoon is over you will both do just as everyone else does, and by a common accord. One day, two years from now, as we are out for a ride and drive past that road, you will say to me, “Oh look, there’s that chalet I was never going to leave!” And you will laugh your heartfelt laugh, showing your pretty teeth. I have said nothing of all this to Louis; we would be giving him too many good reasons to snicker. I will very neutrally inform him of your marriage and your desire to keep it a secret. Unfortunately, you require neither a mother nor a sister to prepare the bridal chamber. Here it is October: you are starting with winter, brave woman that you are. Were there not a marriage involved here, I would say you are taking the bull by the horns.[7] In any case, you will have in me the most discreet and intelligent friend. The mysterious heart of Africa has devoured many travelers, and I believe that, sentimentally speaking, you are setting off on a voyage very like those that have cost many explorers their lives, at the hands of the savages or in the desert sands. Your own desert is but two leagues from Paris, and so I can say to you, light of heart: Bon voyage! You will be back.

  51

  FROM COUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE TO MADAME MARIE GASTON

  1835

  What news of you, my dear? After a silence of two years, Renée is permitted to feel some concern for Louise. Ah, there’s love for you! It sweeps away, it erases a friendship like ours. You must admit, even if I
adore my children still more than you love your Gaston, maternal sentiment is expansive enough to diminish no other affection, and to permit a married woman to remain a sincere and devoted friend. I miss your letters, your sweet, charming face. O Louise, I am reduced to trying to guess how you live!

  As for us, I will explain everything as succinctly as I can.

  Rereading your next-to-last letter, I found a subtle little jab at us, occasioned by our current political situation. You mocked us for not having renounced the post of presiding officer at the Court of Audit, which we had acquired, along with the title of count, by the good graces of Charles X, but could I have suitably established Athénaïs and that poor little beggar René on forty thousand livres a year, thirty of them set aside in a majorat? Were we not duty bound to live off the wages of our position, meanwhile patiently saving up the revenues from our lands? In twenty years we will have amassed some six hundred thousand francs, which will serve as an endowment for both my daughter and for René, whom I have destined for the navy. My little beggar will have an annual interest income of ten thousand livres; perhaps we will find a way to leave him enough capital to make his share even with his sister’s. When he is a ship’s captain, my beggar will marry a wealthy woman and will enjoy a social rank every bit as elevated as his brother’s.

  These calculations showed us that it was wisest to accept France’s new political order. Naturally, the new dynasty has named Louis a peer of France and a grand officer of the Legion of Honor. From the moment l’Estorade first took his oath, he could do nothing halfway; he did yeoman service in the National Assembly, and now he has attained a position that he will go on holding untroubled till the end of his days. He has a certain talent for finance; he is more an agreeable speaker than an orator, but that is enough for what we seek from the political world. His finesse, his skills in both government and administration are appreciated, he is considered irreplaceable by all sides. I can tell you that he was recently offered an ambassadorship, but I had him decline. Armand is now thirteen years old and Athénaïs eleven; I must stay in Paris for their education, and I mean to remain here through René’s, which is now only beginning.

  Only if we did not have three children to raise and establish could we have remained faithful to the Bourbons and retired to our lands. My angel, a mother must not imitate Decius, especially in an age when Deciuses are few and far between.[8] In fifteen years, l’Estorade will be able to return to La Crampade with a fine pension, installing Armand as an auditor in the Court of Audit. As for René, the navy will no doubt make of him a diplomat. At seven years of age that little boy is already as shrewd as an aged cardinal.

  Ah! Louise, I am such a happy mother! My children continue to give me joys never darkened by shadow. (Senza brama sicura ricchezza.) Armand is at the Collège Henri IV. I wanted to put him into public education but could not bring myself to be separated from him, and so I have done what the Duke d’Orléans did before he was—perhaps so that he could become—Louis-Philippe. Lucas, that old servant whom you know, takes Armand to school each morning at the hour of the first study hall, then brings him back to me at four thirty. A wise old tutor, who lives with us, oversees his work in the evenings and wakes him at the hour when schoolboys rise. Lucas brings him his lunch at noon recess. I thus see him at dinner and then before he goes to bed in the evening, and I see him off every morning. Armand is still the charming child you love, full of heart and devotion; his tutor is pleased with him. I have my Naïs and the little one with me, both forever underfoot, but I am as much a child as they. I cannot do without the sweetness of my dear children’s caresses. The possibility of running to Armand’s bed whenever I please, to watch him as he sleeps, or to steal or seek or receive a kiss from that angel is to me a vital necessity of existence.

  Nonetheless, there are drawbacks to the system of keeping one’s children at home, and I have noted them well. Like Nature, Society is jealous; it allows no one to trample on its laws or tamper with their order. Children not sent off to school are exposed at too young an age to the fires of the social world: they see its passions, they study its ruses. Unable to make out the fine distinctions that govern the conduct of adults, they submit the world to their passions and sentiments, rather than submit their desires and demands to the world; they adopt a false showiness, which shines more brightly than solid virtues, for the world prizes nothing so much as appearances dressed in deceptive guise. When a child of fifteen has the self-assurance of a man of the world, he is a monstrosity; at twenty-five he is an old man, and by that precocious sophistication he makes himself inapt for the sort of sincere studies on which real and serious talents are founded. Society is a great actor, and like any actor, it absorbs and sends back, preserving nothing. A mother who keeps her children at home must therefore firmly resolve to shield them from society, must have the courage to oppose their desires and her own, to avoid showing them off. Cornelia had to keep her jewels well hidden.[9] I will do the same, for my children are my entire life.

  I am thirty years old; the heat of the day has passed, the hardest stretch of road is behind me. In a few years I will be an old woman, and I draw great strength from the sense that I have done my duty. Those three little dears seem to know my thoughts and conform to them. There are mysterious connections between us, for they have never left me. And of course they smother me with delights, as if fully realizing how much they owe me for all I have done.

  For the first three years of his schooling Armand was slow and dreamy; he worried me, but now he has taken wing. No doubt he has realized those preparatory labors’ true purpose, something children do not always see, which is to habituate them to hard work, to sharpen their intelligence, and to mold them to obedience, the guiding principle of all successful societies. My dear, a few days ago I had the intoxicating sensation of seeing Armand triumph at the concours général, in the Sorbonne itself! Your godson took first place in translation from Latin. At the Collège Henri IV’s annual prize ceremony he took first place in both verse and Latin composition. I went pale as I heard his name read out, and I wanted to shout: I am the mother! Naïs was squeezing my hand so hard that it hurt, or would have, if pain were possible at such moments. Ah! Louise, that joy is worth any number of lost loves.

  Those triumphs have stimulated my little René, who wants to go to school just like his older brother. Sometimes the three children scream and tear through the house, and they make such a din I feel my head might split. I do not know how I put up with it, because I am always with them; I have never entrusted anyone with the care of my children, not even Mary. But there are so many joys to be had from that beautiful business of motherhood! To see a child breaking off his play to come give me a kiss, as if driven by some urgent need . . . what a joy! I can also study them far more closely this way. One of a mother’s duties is to determine her children’s aptitudes, nature, and vocation from their earliest age—something no teacher could ever do. Children raised by their mothers invariably display self-assurance and sociability; those two acquired traits are a vital supplement to native intelligence, whereas native intelligence can never replace what men learn from their mothers. Even now I can spot those differences among the men I meet in drawing rooms, and I can immediately make out a woman’s touch in a young man’s manners. How could I possibly rob my children of that advantage? As you see, there are many pleasures, many fulfillments to be found in simply doing my duty.

  I have no doubt that Armand will be the most excellent magistrate, the most upright administrator, the most conscientious député ever to be found, and my René the bravest, boldest, and at the same time the craftiest sailor in the world. That little scamp has an iron will; he gets everything he wants, he makes a thousand detours to arrive at his goal, and if those thousand do not take him there, he finds a thousand and first. Where my dear Armand calmly resigns himself and seeks to understand why things are as they are, my René rages, contrives, calculates, sweet-talking all the while, and in the end discovers a crack
; if it is wide enough for a knife blade, he is soon driving his little coach straight through it.

  As for Naïs, she is so like me that I cannot distinguish her flesh from my own. Ah! that little dear, that beloved girl I am happily turning into a coquette, braiding and curling her hair, throwing all my love into the task, I want her to be happy; she will be given only to one who loves her and whom she loves. But, my God! when I allow her to primp herself, when I thread berry-red ribbons through her hair, when I put shoes on those dainty little feet, my mind and my heart are assailed by a thought that nearly brings me to my knees. Is a mother truly the mistress of her daughter’s fate? Perhaps she will love a man who is unworthy of her, perhaps she will not be loved by the man she loves. Often I find my eyes filling with tears when I look at her. Imagine losing a charming creature, a flower, a rose who lived in your breast like a bud on the rosebush, imagine giving her to a man who steals it all away! It is you—who in two years have never written me the words “I am happy!”—it is you who reminded me of the great wrench that is marriage, a formidable blow for any mother as much a mother as I. Farewell. I do not see why I should be writing you, you do not deserve my friendship. Oh! answer me, my Louise.